“Nathaniel Lord,”Squire Lord” as he was familiarly known, came to the office of Register and served from 1815 to 1851. During his term of office, the Probate Court and Registry attained the dignity of a building, erected for its own use. In the year 1817, the County erected a brick building forty feet long, twenty-eight feet wide and one story high, which was occupied December 15, 1817 and at last the Records were deposited in a secure vault. In the year 1852, the Registry and its records were removed to Salem. The Probate Court continued to sit semi-annually until September 15, 1874, holding its sessions in the Town Hall. During the War of the Rebellion, the vacant Probate building was occupied as the barracks of a military company recruited here by Capt. John A. Hobbs. It was sold to the Lodge of Odd Fellows, December 26, 1867 and was enlarged by the building of an addition on the western end and the addition of a second story.”

By 1884 a second floor had been added, and it housed the Odd Fellows upstairs, with Blake’s Drug Store (later Savory’s Drug Store) and the Post Office downstairs.

The Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Agawam Lodge, No. 52, was organized 13 November 1844 for the purpose of mutual assistance among its members.The meetings were held in the Odd Fellows’ Hall the first and third evenings each month.

Photo from Harold Bowen’s Tales of Olde Ipswich. Savory’s Drug Store closed in the 1960’s. Bowen noted that the town’s first telephone exchange was located in a back room of the store in 1890, and that Savory also ran a hardware business from the building..

The view today is quite similar to this old photograph, with the exception that wings have been added to the Ipswich Public Library.

The old Treadwell house was taken down to build the Library. This sketch from Genealogy of the Willcomb Family shows it next to the Probate Court, which later gained a second floor and is now the Odd Fellows Building.